Under the table.
Have you ever found yourself under the table?
What does it look like?
Petrified bubble gum?
Usually we are at the table. But under the table, that is something else.
It means several things, it means being sneaky, or being passed out, or being left out, or on the edge, unnoticed, out of sight, out of mind, unseen, unheard.
What does history look like from the underside of the table? Waiting for the crumbs to fall while the Titans of the world jockey for larger and larger slices of the pie?
It is always an unpleasant awakening to realize just how many people live under the table. Waiting. Hiding. Trying not to be stepped on or run out. Begging, longing, demanding for medicine, for a country to call home, for a job, for love, for life.
Jesus was hiding out, he had been at table with those who considered themselves worthy to decide who could and could not be at the table.
Jesus had confronted them with their hypocrisy over what defiles humanity. It is really about how we treat one another.
He needed to let things cool down after that. Get out of town for awhile. Cross the border into the gentile territories.
So Jesus was hiding out, he went under the table, but he was found out. As we all know, you can’t hide from a dog, they always find you.
Except it wasn’t a dog, it was an uppity gentile woman, someone outside Israel who needed Jesus to save her child.
It was a common saying for Jews to call gentiles dogs. They were outside the boundaries of God’s family on the fringes of God’s presence.
Dogs generally were not pets back then, they were semi domesticated, living on the fringes, cleaning up scraps and garbage.
So the dog found Jesus and reminded him about what defiles. It’s how we treat each other.
She wins the argument. She who stood outside of the people of God now stands in the company of those who argued with God, who talked God down, people like Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Job.
Jesus gives in, a unique event in scripture and her child is set free from the demon that possessed her.
The test of faith in scripture is not to merely accept the conditions of the world, it is not a peaceful contentment or an elevated zen state.
The test of faith is the Passion. The passion of facing God and demanding that the Universe be different.
The Syrophoenician mother demands that the universe be different. And it is so. Her faith changes things. The test of faith seems to be a holy discontent that argues with God.
Faith takes the pain of the world and drives us to God in need, in demand and in action.
Biblical faith is “no peace but strife closed in the sod”, as the old Percy hymn goes.
And her faith sets Jesus free as well.
Jesus frees the child from possession and then he moves on to other gentile settlements and opens the ears of the deaf man and releases his tongue.
He sets the two captives free. Freedom seems to spread like a contagion.
Stories of being set free, faith changing the world, of grace coming to us under the table.
The resurrection is an under the table miracle that out sneaks and out cheats evil and the demonic and the titans of the world.
The cross casts God out to the dogs, to the fringes of death. God plays the wild card from under the table and turns death upside down, setting the captives free.
The table is turned over.
The underside of the table becomes the altar of life itself.
The crumbs become the body of God.
Grace. Grace comes to us from under the table, unexpected and demanding, demanding that the Universe be different.
It is surprising what we find under the table.